| How students live in Quebec

FEUQ releases study on provincial shortcomings

The Fédération étudiante universitaire du Québec (FEUQ) thinks the provincial government has failed students. That is how FEUQ president Louis-Philipe Savoie put it, commenting on an extensive report his organization released last Thursday about life as lived by Quebec students.

“It is the responsibility of the Quebec government to ensure support of our students,” Savoie said in an interview Friday. “In that regard, they [the government] have failed.”

Among the report’s findings are that just 22 per cent of full-time Quebec undergraduates’ annual income comes from their parents; 64.8 per cent live away from home; and 33.7 per cent living on their own receive loans and bursaries.

Additionally, 56.5 per cent of full-time undergrads spend more than a third of their income on housing.

Savoie lamented that students are “working at their limit, parents don’t contribute, student aid can’t make ends meet, so you have to take out a student loan.”

The report also found that roughly fifty per cent of part-time undergrads have an income of less than $12,200. Fifty per cent of full-time undergrads have a food budget of over $2,400, roughly the student aid allocation for food.

The report was done in collaboration with Léger Marketing, and 12,619 people responded to the Léger-FEUQ survey. The margin of error for most of the findings is three per cent.

Click here to read the entire FEUQ report

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